ALB
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LBird wrote:outdated, scientifically disproven 'scientific method' of positivism or empiricism, which claims it can 'know' the external object (ie. reality) completely, absolutely, and thus produce 'The Truth'.
Are you sure that "positivism" teaches that science can discover "Absolute Truth" or that this claim is the dominant one in contemporary theory of science?Ironically, it is Lenin's theory of "truth" (that knowledge is a mirror reflection of reality) that comes closer to this and was why Anton Pannekoek saw it as confirmation that the Bolsheviks' role in Russia was introducing capitalism not socialism.
Don't disagree with that (except the maths is a bit beyond me). It's the word "ideology" with reference to socialist/communist theory that I've doubts about using. Our view is "science", the ruling class view is "ideology" ! Or at least our view is "truer" (more accurate and so more practically useful) than theirs.
The difference is that they are "true" in two difference senses of the word. "1 + 1 = 2" is true by definition (because that's how we define "2"). It is not based on any evidence and can't be refuted by any evidence. That "the Earth goes round the Sun" doesn't have to be the case. It is not true by definition. That the Sun goes round the Earth is conceivable. In fact for centuries the accepted description of the movement of the planets was based on this theory and was even able to predict their movement more or less accurately. Since, in the end, this kind of truth is a description that enables humans to better survive in nature by being able to predict what will happen, this theory was temporarily even "true" in this sense. Later, a better description was made, based on the Earth moving round the Sun, and this became the new "truth" as it fitted in better with what was observed and allowed what would happen to be more accurately predicted.I suppose it's a distinction between "absolute truth" (true by definition) and "relative truth" (true on the basis of being an evidence-based description that helps humans survive practically in nature and which can be refuted if some other description is put forward which can predict more accurately what will happen and so is more useful).
Isn't there a difference between something that is true by definition (e.g.that 1 + 1 = 2) and something that is "true" as a fact (e.g. that the Earth goes wrong the Sun), i.e the difference between something that is necessarily true and something that happens to be true?
LBird wrote:I think Communism is an ideology. All humans have to choose which ideology they want to employ, to build their understand of the world around. I think we should be open about ours, the better to expose others. And if they don't consciously choose, then one is provided for them by the existing ruling class. Unconsciousness of one's ideology is not the same as not having one. We all do have one.I think you mean that communist theory, not communism, is an ideology since communism(or socialism, the same thing) is a system of society.Literally interpreted, your position here is more SPGB than the SPGB in that it gives the impression that you think establishing communism is just a question of who wins the battle of ideas (or, in your terms, the battle of ideologies). This is something we have been accused of but is a caricature of our position, This ignores of course that socialist theory is a product and reflection of the class struggle between the majority working class and the minority capitalist class that is built-in to capitalist society and which is going on all the time. It is not just the idea/ideology of a different society.Socialism is, as a matter of objective fact not mere opinion, the only framework within which the problems facing the working class in particular (and humanity in general) can be lastingly solved. Socialist theory is a recognition of this objective fact. The theory that capitalism is the only possible form of society at this stage in human history and that socialism is impossible is false. It is true that most workers now think this but this is a reflection of bourgeois ideology. It is a false consciousness (a false "understand of the world around").Terminology is not all that important as long as we understand what is being talked about. So it's not all that important that you want to express the distinction between what I'd prefer to call socialist (or communist) theory and ruling class ideology (as false consciousness) as being between communist ideology (true) and ruling class ideology (false). I trust of course that you are not some post-modernist who thinks that both (indeed, all) ideologies are equally valid, just a matter of choice. Or, as the wit said, that cannibalism is just a matter of taste.
alanjjohnstone wrote:I too have a few reservations with Ollman such as his apparent acceptance of socialism and communism being different stages but i think you are raising just a problem of terminology here."New human beings who know how to co-operate and want to do so will make socialism possible" .Obviously it is not the evolution of a new species he means but i took it to read people who have acquired class consciousness, which is a change in thought and ideas and outlook and something people will need for us to achieve socialism. The old case of of the class moving on from from a "class in itself" to "class for itself".Maybe that's all he meant, but it's misleading to talk of workers becoming "new human beings" when they become a "class for itself". Workers already know how to co-operate and do in fact cooperate. What's lacking at the moment is not the capacity to cooperate but the will to do so to get socialism..Or did you become a "new man" when you became a socialist.
alanjjohnstone wrote:While reading up on co-ops i happened upon this by Bertell Ollman which some on this thread might find of interest….In revolutions, however, people undergo dramatic changes, and, if a revolution in an advanced capitalist country is to succeed, people will have to develop, as I've argued, many of the same qualities that are called upon in building a socialist society. Thus, the kind of reforms that may appear sensible today, based on people remaining pretty much as they are, will appear much less so. The market socialist suit tailored on today's measurements will no longer fit. New human beings who know how to cooperate and want to do so will make full socialism possible. http://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/ms_ch04.phpNow it's Ollman who is talking crap. This idea that socialism requires "new human beings" lends support to Sotionov's criticism that socialists/communists are just utopians who want to change "human nature" and needs knocking on the head straighaway. Socialism is not incompatible with "people remaining pretty much as they are". As we put it in our pamphlet Are We Prisoners of Our Genes?:
Quote:The coming of socialism will not require great changes in the way we behave, essentially only the accentuation of some of the behaviours which people exhibit today (friendliness, helpfulness, cooperation) at the expense of others which capitalism encourages. Capitalism has an all-pervading culture of violence, competitiveness and acquisitiveness, and people are under pressure to adapt their behaviour to this. In socialism this culture will disappear and people’s behaviour will no longer be shaped by it.Let's not weaken our case by talking of a supposed need for "new human beings" for socialism to work.
LBird wrote:…science may confirm that ‘there is nothing in the biological make-up of human beings that would prevent them living [with]… 'free access communism'’, but that isn’t the same as science arguing that ‘humans are innately disposed to f.a.c.’, either.That was the point of my earlier post,Entirely agree. That was my point too.
LBird wrote:…that humans must want to choose to live in a society based on ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’.Yes, agree again.
Quote:There is no ‘biological imperative’ for that type of social arrangement, either, just as there isn’t for Sotionov’s position.Entirely agree yet again (this is turning into an exercise of mutual admiration). Having said that, I think somebody could make out a strong case for capitalism being "against human nature" by trying to reduce us all to isolated competing social atoms whereas we are a social species. It would be nice if this were true, but I'm not arguing this myself.
LBird wrote:But your reply seemed to, at the least, soft-pedal on the need for the basics of f.a.c. to be argued for, as part of a Communist ideological framework. [….] I think it is an ideological argument, which we must actively propagandise for.Of course I agree that, to get to socialism/free-access communism (the same thing) people must want and understand this. And that the main tasks of socialists today is to argue the case for socialism. After all, this is the long-standing SPGB position!My objection was to the word "ideological" because of the association, in some interpretations of Marx, of ideology as "false consciousness". Obviously, socialist consciousness won't be ideological in this sense as it will be an accurate understanding of the situation and of what needs to be done.I assume by "ideological" you simply mean "in the field of ideas". Yes, socialists are engaged in a battle of ideas, but I think we need to find another word than "ideological" to express this.
Nice touch, the break for Thanksgiving. I would have thought that with their immense knowledge on display they would have known that this means nothing in England. The Fall neither.
As promised, LBird, here's the "scientific findings of social anthropology" you were asking about, taken from our pamphlet Are We Prisoners of Our Genes?:
Quote:When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933 biological determinism became a state ideology. This was to be its undoing, at least temporarily, as with the defeat of Germany more accurate views on human biology and behaviour came to the fore. Racism and eugenics were repudiated and it came to be recognised that human behaviour was socially and culturally, not biologically, determined. This was based on solid scientific research and was well expressed (apart from the then prevailing confusion of “human” and “man”) by Kenneth Boulding in 1966:“It is the great peculiarity of man, however, differentiating him from all the other animals, that what his genes endow him with is an enormous nervous system of some 10 billion components, the informational content of which is derived almost wholly from the environment, that is, from inputs into the organism from outside. The genetic contribution to man’s nervous system is virtually complete at birth. Almost everything that happens thereafter is learned. It is this consideration which inspires the modern anthropologist to declare that man has virtually no instincts and that virtually everything he knows has to be learned from his environment, which consists both of the physical world in which he lives and moves and the social world into which he is born” (in Man and Aggression, edited by MF Ashley Montagu, OUP, 1968, pp 86-87).And by the anthropologist Alexander Allard in 1972:"Anthropologists realized long ago that purely biological explanations of human behavior are inadequate. Our behavior is based on customs which develop in the context of specific social and environmental conditions. While they do reflect the fact that man like all other animals must adjust to the environment to survive, attempts to link human behavioral systems to simple geographic or genetic factors have always failed. This is because man's major behavioral adaptation is culture."Culture is learned and shared. It is rooted in biology. But although this is true (the capacity for culture is part of a normal human's brain structure), culture frees man to an unprecedented degree from strictly biological controls over the development and maintenance of behavioral systems. Culture is biologically adaptive. That is, human populations imbedded, like all animal populations, in specific environments adjust to these environments largely through culture."Man is born with a capacity to learn culture, not with culture. This does not mean that all human behavior is freed of biological programming. Individuals are born different. The outcome of heredity and experience will lead to differences in temperament and ability which make it possible for the human group to function as a social entity."The human being has been shaped by evolution. His size, the fact that he walks on two feet, his relative lack of body hair, and the fact that he can and does talk are all products of the evolutionary process. What man does and also what he believes are also products of evolution. But those elements which depend upon culture are not inherited biologically. In part, man adapts biologically to his environment in a non-biological way—through culture."Since man is one of the most widely distributed of species occupying a vast array of environments ranging from deserts to swampland, from plains to mountains, from inland to the sea, and because his social and technological environment varies as widely, we should not be surprised to find a range of behavioral variation adjusted to specific environments" (The Human Imperative, Columbia University Press, 1972, pp. 21-22).This finding was never popular with those who supported class rule and capitalist privilege. It had implications which were too democratic, let alone too socialist, for them. In fact, it confirmed that the so-called “human nature objection” to socialism was completely unfounded: people could adapt to living in socialism, just as they had adapted to living in primitive tribal communism, ancient slave society, feudalism and capitalism.and
Quote:Socialists defend the finding that human behaviour is acquired and not innate, because this is what the accumulated evidence shows. Human behaviour throughout the ages has been so diverse that it is not possible to conclude that, to continue with our examples, aggression, acquisitiveness and male domination, are universal; and not just throughout the ages, such behaviour is not even exhibited by all people today. What this suggests is that humans as a species possess the capacity to engage in a great variety of behaviours and that it is this behavoural flexibility and versatility that is “human nature”.This is confirmed by the study of the genetic make-up of humans. Our brains are adapted for acquiring new behaviours and for thinking abstractly and communicating by means of a structured language based on abstract symbols, and we have a biologically-governed prolonged period of growing up during which we learn the most intensively, in particular language and social skills. Neuroscience is making advances in our understanding of how the brain works but it is not uncovering anything to suggest that complex behaviour patterns such as aggression or possessiveness are, or even could be, innate. Quite the contrary, what neuroscientists are trying to discover is what it is in the make-up and functioning of our brains that allows humans to have a repertoire of many more behaviours than any other animal.In short, the findings of social anthropology show there is nothing in the biological make-up of human beings that would prevent them living in a socialist society (what you call 'free access communism').
Ok, later but the findings don't demonstrate the 'naturalness' of socialism but merely that it is not 'unnatural' (not against an imagined 'human nature') as critics claim.
LBird wrote:Yeah, ‘free access’ Communism can really only be even begun to be grasped from the ideological perspective of the Communist proletarian.I wouldn't go that far. It can be understood by anyone with an elementary knowledge of the scientifc findings of social anthropology. It's not "ideological" in the strict sense of the term. It's a pretty simple concept really. You don't need to be a great intellectual or a grand theoretician to grasp it !
LBird wrote:I think further discussion on ‘safety net’ social mechanisms, asked for by Sotionov, is worth doing, if only to illustrate their probable superfluousness.Agreed. That's what this forum is for.
Sotionov wrote:As I said, if one doesn't hold utopian views, the mechanisms I talk about are neccessary for preneting the democratic and cooperative society from failing. On the other hand, if one is confident in his utopian views, there is no reason to opposse the mechanisms I propose, because if you are right, they will be made superfluous by practice, just like a safety-net is made superfluous when one crosses the walking rope.I don't know what you expect us to do. Adopt your scheme as our official policy? But what would be the point? Besides trying to dictate to the future, this would be to commit ourselves to something that might exclude people who were socialists but disagreed with this particular blueprint. There's nothing stopping a particular socialist holding this view as their own personal view, but it's not the sort of thing to make a party policy.Much more worrying, though, about your proposition is the thinking behind him it, identified by LBird as a reflection of the bourgeois ideology as to what "human nature" is. It's that that's really unacceptable..
Par for the course for groups organised on a Leninist basis. I'd expect a similar controversy to break out sooner or later in the SPI's sister party in Britain (SPEW), as some of those attracted by its programme of immediate reforms realise that they are not really Trotskyists but simple democratic reformists:The article (though written by an obvious CPGB infiltrator) does make the same criticism as us of the typical Trotskyist reform programme that "aims to tailor its demands to the present consciousness of workers":
Quote:And, to reassure the floor of the SP’s ‘credibility’, the table presented ‘solutions’ to the Irish state’s €16.2 billion fiscal deficit. There followed the expected reformist drivel about the need for higher corporate and capital gains taxation, a wealth tax, a financial transactions tax and so on. (….)The terrible irony here is that such ‘credible’ demands are utterly impossible to achieve under capitalism and do not even articulate the need for socialism. They are truly transitional to nothing; save sowing illusions. The inevitable effect of this ‘transitional’ routine – in which the (supposed) socialist consciousness of the SP plays no part – is that the SP’s ‘programme’ is nothing more than an eclectic, incoherent mess of demands that could never advance the cause of socialism. Socialism is an utter non-sequitur as far as the actual practice of the SP is concerned.Quite. It's the same with SPEW here with their incredible 'credible' demands to "tax the rich" to finance "massive public spending" on houses, schools and hospitals.
